I'm a big fan of indie game crossovers, from the guest levels in They Bleed Pixels to the playable pups from comics and games in our upcoming game Russian Subway Dogs. So it may come as no small surprise that a couple of our characters are making appearances in other indie games.

Clawed Girl playable in Bleed 2

The excellent Bleed 2 came out last month and among the playable characters is the Clawed Girl from They Bleed Pixels!

The Bleed games share more than a similar title with They Bleed Pixels. Not only did they originate near our HQ in Toronto, Canada, but the creator Ian Campbell also shares our penchant for cute pixel art, a willingness to experiment with novel control schemes, and fast platforming with an emphasis on precision and mobility. If you're a fan of They Bleed Pixels, you owe it to yourself to check out both Bleed games. You can pick up Bleed and Bleed 2 on steam now!

Russian Subway Dog cameo in Ruin of the Reckless

You may know that the Ratcoon enemy from upcoming action roguelike Ruin of the Reckless is playable in Russian Subway Dogs, but our titular Canine will also be appearing in Faux-Operative's new game. The exact nature of the Subway Dog's appearance is still a mystery, and I've been told finding our pupper will be a challenge in itself. Ruin of the Reckless will be available on Steam sometime next month, April 2017 but you can wishlist it right now!

I've been posting progress on Russian Subway Dogs pretty regularly on twitter, but it can be hard to hunt them down if you miss them. I figure it'd be good to have them all in one place, so what I'm planning on doing is posting a big gallery round up of all the images approximately once a month.

We've had this localized version in the works with the Playism folks for a while now, but have been waiting for the Crimson Update to be complete before going forward. I worked closely with Playism, picking appropriate Japanese fonts and altering layouts to work with them and I'm honestly quite proud of the results. I think we really managed to incorporate the translated text while preserving the original typography and design, which can be a tricky balance.

It's been an interesting process. The Japanese character sets are very different from English. Not only are most words shorter but many characters are denser, more complex and have more curves and less straight lines then the roman character set. This creates a unique challenge given much of our text layout in They Bleed Pixels was built around a blocky pixel font and a thin flowing art nouveau script.

The solution I decided on is a mix of finding a good blocky Japanese font with a similar weight and (where it's appropriate) leaving the original English in and incorporating the Japanese text as a design element. A trick I borrowed from some of the better visual localization I've seen in manga and anime translated in the other direction. I've included a bunch of screenshots from both versions of TBP in this post for comparison.

Japanese media has been a major influence on my art so it's been really amazing to see the reaction from fans in Japan over the last few years, some of whom I've been lucky enough to meet in person at Tokyo Game Show and Comitia. Not to mention the amazing fan art and let's play videos they've produced! I hope this localization encourages them to give it another play-through and introduces a whole new audience to the game.

Big thanks to the fine folks at Playism for their work localizing the text and spotting all the places where we messed up entering it into the game! I also want to the thank the Japanese fan(s) who created the unofficial translation patch that this translation replaces. There was a long period where that was the only way to play the game in Japanese. I know there are many players who were introduced to They Bleed Pixels through their work. If you're reading this, hats off!

For English speaking players this Playism version is also the first version available completely DRM free with zero Steam integration. If that's important to you or you hate online leaderboards for some reason you can now buy this version and still get a Steam key with all the bells and whistles!

Also this week the folks at We Love Fine dropped a new They Bleed Pixels shirt featuring art by graphic designer Charles Noard! You can pick it up in both unisex and women's fitted styles in a range of colours.

If you bought and enjoyed They Bleed Pixels or another game on this list at a discount we’d encourage you to buy a gift copy for a friend at full price if you can afford to.

We all love getting games at a discount so why is it important to buy full price when you can? Because when prices get too low (as they are now) indie game development becomes unsustainable. That means less risks taken, less experimentation, less games that cater to a particular niche and less indie games in general.

You definitely won’t get big updates years after a game comes out like our recent Crimson Update for They Bleed Pixels

You may not even get those few rare big indie hits that make serious money! Many of the hit game you’ve played were not the first games made by those creators and they could only happen because their early games had some moderate success.

No one is making indie games because they want to strike it rich. Were doing this because we love games and we love making them. But we do need to make a working wage to keep doing what we do and making the games you love.

The long wait is over for Mac and Linux users, They Bleed Pixels is now available for your OS of choice! All three operating systems are also getting the brand new Crimson Update free! More levels, more polish, more blood!

As an extra bonus They Bleed Pixels is 75% off for the next week (June 3-10th)!

While the Crimson Update is free for everyone, its existence came at a terrible cost, documented in our new live action trailer, a collaboration with photographer Paul Hillier.

Crimson Update Features:

New engine rewritten in C for 60fps gameplay on netbooks and older computers.

Shorter and easier Novice Difficulty levels.

New bonus levels! Winter’s End and exp. 666.

Record, play and share your best runs on the leaderboards. Watch the top players to improve your runs!

Enhanced blood effects! Double the blood particles!

Support for both DirectInput and XInput controllers.

Lots of other little bits of polish, from save games to graphics options.

You may have noticed our website has had a major overhaul and is full up to date information (gasp!) .

After an almost five year hiatus (ahhh!) we final have a development Blog again. We basically went devblog silent for the entire production of They Bleed Pixels and the upcoming free They Bleed Pixels - Crimson Update. We're moving onto the next big project and so this silence ends now! That said, till we officially announce our new project, we will be vague. Probably also inconsistently updated. Let that be our motto for the new blog: "inconsistent and vague".

The entries you see below are taken from our tumblr and our old Guerrilla Gardening Development blog. Speaking of Guerrilla Gardening : Seeds of Revolution the new website now includes a memorial archive for that now mothballed project. Lots of information on the development of the game, why we shelved it and some never released pre-production artwork.

For fans of They Bleed Pixels we now have a much more extensive fan art gallery including a section for cosplay photographs and videos. Expect some new wallpapers when the Crimson Update drops as well.

Seriously folks, seeing people dress up as the Clawed Girl from They Bleed Pixels keeps blowing me away! I feel like it’s on of the highest complements to have someone take the time and effort to create a costume and dress up as your character. So Great!

Remember the great They Bleed Pixels piece from the Indie Ape show in San Francisco? Well you now have a chance to own a copy! We’ve made arrangements with the artist to do a limited run of fifty signed and numbered prints*!

Here's an interesting tumblr post on how both Shovel Knight and They Bleed Pixels add elements of risk and reward to checkpoints. I wasn’t aware of Shovel Knights’ checkpoint destruction for cash system till reading this. Great to see other game devs experimenting with systems that integrate checkpoints and saving into the gameplay in a meaningful way. There’s a lot of unexplored territory there.

By the way, our friend Mathew Kumar who originally suggested the They Bleed Pixels checkpoint system has an upcoming game called Knight & Damsel in the works folks may want to check out. He also designed a particularly devious They Bleed Pixels guest level coming in the next update.

Quick little story. The blood in They Bleed Pixels is a mix of Andrew’s carefully coded particle physics system and some hand animated splash effects I pixeled. We worked together to fine tune how each element of that system worked to get it looking just right.. or thought we had… except we messed up. The splash animations I drew don’t run properly in the current version. They’re far too slow and are possibly skipping frames. This only became apparent to us when we got the blood up and running in the to be released rewrite and whatever obscure XNA bug was messing with them didn’t make it over. Suddenly the blood looked EVEN BETTER then before! Andrew has also raised the cap on the number of blood particles that can appear at one time before the engine starts culling them (previously 4000 particles), so along with all the other improvements in the next update expect even better looking blood effects!

As some of you may know we’ve been working on a major rewrite/update of They Bleed Pixels for the last year or so. Among other things it will drastically improve the experience of playing the game on low end machines like older laptops and netbooks with wider compatibility for older graphic cards and gamepads. There will also be new bonus levels and an easy mode with some shorter, easier levels.

We’ve had our nose to the grindstone on this and haven’t been doing a great job keeping folks up to date on its progress, other then some tweets and FB updates. Andrew (the programming half of Spooky Squid) has fixed this and is now posting very detailed progress on our Steam forums.

Once this update is out of the way we should have Mac and Linux ports out shortly with the possibility of some console stuff following that.

So outside of Spooky Squid Games I’m also part of the Hand Eye Society a Videogame arts and culture non-profit here in Toronto. As part of that I started a project called Comics vs Games a couple years ago that keeps getting bigger every year. The third one happens this weekend as part of the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) and it is going to be madness. Here’s where you’ll be able to find me (Miguel) or the other half of Spooky Squid (Andrew) all weekend.

Saturday and Sunday May 10-11th at TCAFBlack Church Brigandage 2/4 player versus barbarian sports game I created with comic artist Andy Belanger will be playable at the Comics vs Games Showcase. This game isn’t available anywhere so it’s a rare chance to play it. Here’s a video of a 1vs1 match I played against fellow game dev Christine Love, however it really shines in 2vs2. It’ll be upstairs near the elevators at the TCAF main location along with a whole bunch of other games. I’ll also be there most of Sunday if you want to chat or challenge me to match.

I’ll also be on the following panel talking about traveling in Japan with TCAF:

Sunday, May 11 12:15 pm - 1:15 pmToronto Marriott Bloor Yorkville Hotel - Google MapTCAF International: Japan, England, and Beyond!The Toronto Comic Arts Festival has been exhibiting on behalf of the Canadian Comics Industry and Canadian artists in Tokyo, Japan, for the past 2 years. In 2014 and 2015 we plan to head back to Tokyo, as well as other destinations around the world! Find out about our trips, what we’re hoping to accomplish, and how you as an artist or publisher can get involved.

So if your in Toronto and a fan of Spooky Squid Games, or just comics and games in general you should come out! Full info on Comics vs Games including times & locations here:http://torontocomics.com/comics-vs-games-3/

I’ve been wanting to test the PS4 gamepad with They Bleed Pixels for awhile so today I picked one up and ran a few tests. Good news is with a few quick tweaks it works and works well, especially if you’ve wanted to play with a good D-pad (honestly something the 360 gamepad lacks).

If you just connect the PS4 pad without installing anything you only get some limited directInput compatibility which won’t work with They Bleed Pixels and a lot of other modern games. You’ll need to install this XInput wrapper:

[We are in no way responsible for this wrapper. It worked for us but don’t blame us if it causes you trouble.]

Once that’s done load up They Bleed Pixels and switch movement to the D-pad in the options and you’re good to go! One thing to note is that since the motors in the PS4 are different then the 360’s the force feedback feels deeper and less sharp. You might want to turn that off if you find it distracting.

Just to head off any questions, NO this does not mean we’re porting TBP to the PS4. I just wanted to let folks know about another controller option available to them.

Update: if you do choose to use a PS4 pad, know that the bluetooth doesn't always play well with all devices so you may need to use it wired up via USB.

I’ll be painting (pixel art) with the En Masse collaborative art project tomorrow (Dec 13th, 2013) at Toronto Long Winter music and culture festival. If you’re in and around Toronto come out, catch some great music and watch me draw! I won’t be the only game related person at the show, DrinkBox Studios have curated a bunch of indie games to play and I Am Robot and Proud from Sound Shapes will be performing live. Should be an awesome night.

This is actually the second time I’m drawing with En Masse. The first was at Design Festa Gallery in Harajuku, Tokyo where I drew the 2-bit Clawed Girl you see in the photos above. I had an amazing time, and it was one of the highlights of my 2012 Japan trip.

Want extra incentive?There’s a good chance I’ll be drawing something related to our next, as yet unannounced game tomorrow night!

Spooky Squid Games

Carefully crafted independent games mixing old school presentation with modern design. A fine blend of super cute pixels and dark occult secrets. Creators of Night of the Cephalopods, They Bleed Pixels and others.

SPOOKY SQUID GAMESCarefully crafted independent games mixing old school presentation with modern design. A fine blend of super cute pixels and dark occult secrets. Creators of Night of the Cephalopods,They Bleed Pixels and others.